So instead you follow Honey inside. The maître d’ leads you through to the giant terrace out back. Mrs. Zamner doesn’t seem to mind at all that you join them.
Honey lights a smoke. Her mother lights a smoke. You light a smoke, what the hell. They smoke like chimneys these people. Haven’t they heard of lung cancer in Europe?
“Mom,” Honey says. “You know Lee.”
“Of course,” Heidi Zamner replies.
“You remember him. Doesn’t work. Janitor of the building he lives in. Does nothing all day. Johnny’s friend since high school.”
“Yes. Certainly. How’s that working out?”
“What? Not having a job?” you say. “Or being Johnny’s friend?” You glance quickly at Honey. Despite yourself.
“Having no job.”
“Oh. Well, it’s not easy. You never have any money.”
“I guess not.”
“And it’s not very exciting.”
“Right.”
“And it’s humiliating. When people ask you about it.” You smile at her.
Mrs. Zamner smiles back. “I imagine it would be.”
“I’m going to stick with it, though.”
“Lovely then. Make us proud.”
Honey orders the salmon. Her mother orders salmon. The two ladies at the table next to you are having salmon. The waitress looks like she would order the salmon if she were sitting with you. For some reason you’re reminded of an old line you used to hear a lot at the Elbow Room: there are two things in life that smell like fish and one of them is fish. You order a big salad that also promises bacon and cheese and little pieces of chopped-up egg and probably those freakishly tiny corn cobs. The waitress wants to know what dressing you want. You ask for a thick meat sauce. With a grin. Settle for ranch and no smile back.
“You were on television,” Heidi Zamner says now. “Was it as much fun as you pretended?”
“No,” you admit. Dash your cigarette out.
“Were you nervous?”
“Yes.” Strange. That you would choose to answer this honestly.
She takes a second to gather you in. She’s studying you for signs of sincerity. “You don’t want to talk about it?” she asks.
“I don’t,” you say. And you mean it.
And so she stops. She’s good that way, Mrs. Zamner.
You talk instead about Honey. Her job. Mrs. Zamner asks Honey a lot of questions about the hospital and nursing, but mostly it’s about whether Honey likes doing it. You’re pretty sure Honey’s mother knows Honey isn’t exactly super committed to being a nurse. But she can’t come out and say it. She can’t say negative things. Mrs. Zamner says only positive things. She has a great smile. She’s the great encourager.
And Honey has been in it a long time now, actually. Over five years. So maybe she will stick with it. She’s hard to pin that way. You don’t think of a nurse as someone who loves clubs and dancing and drinking and getting loud. Or as someone who can be out until four in the morning and then do a twelve-hour shift on two hours’ sleep. But that’s her. Back when Honey was in nursing school you remember her going to class stoned more than a few times. And now at work she always seems to be in search of the lightest floor and the easiest shift. She likes drinking coffee and gabbing with the other girls. Joking with the boys. She has no interest in promotion or additional training. She maintains a popular profile with Nursing Office mostly by never complaining about what schedule she’s given, quietly accepting all the nights they book her. There’s less to do at nights, less to be sloppy at. She’s shown a recent interest in the psychiatry ward but that’s only because nurses get to wear their own clothes there.
As you watch Honey and Heidi Zamner talk, you wonder if the man at the table behind them is listening in. The way he’s leaning in. He’s extremely thin, like you. Unattractive, like you. But in a different way. He’s older. He has hair in a perfect steel-grey tone, everything in place, one of those men who will never lose a single hair on his head during his lifetime. Tight beady curls sewn to his head. Like a wire brush. A hairline an ape would covet. Full sideburns and a steel-grey moustache. He’s all about his hair. With good reason, of course. His nose hooks forward in an almost violent way. His eyes have raccoon rims around them, only partially obscured by his tinted glasses. His skin is bumpy. You have a thing about spotting unattractive men. It gives you hope. Are you better-looking than this one? That’s what you’re always secretly asking yourself.
You watch him over their shoulders, casually spooning his soup and reading his paper. You can see also that he is a very tall man, again like you. He’s wearing a beige suit with a colourful shirt and a colourful tie. Flashy shoes. You’ve seen this sort of guy before. Many times. Throw a stick at the auto show or a school board meeting and you’ll hit ten of him.
You switch gears, aim your spaceship back towards the table. Honey and her mother are discussing gay people now. Or gays in hospitals, more specifically. It seems. Apparently Heidi knows a doctor who’s brilliant and gay and also works at the Royal Victoria. Heidi Zamner always knows people who are brilliant. Everyone is brilliant.
Honey interrupts, launches into a story about her and Johnny and a trip to Barbados they once took. When they were first dating. It catches you by surprise, hearing her suddenly describe this, and you’re not sure why she’s doing it.
“And so we go to Barbados. Which is, like, expensive. But Johnny had some money saved, and his brothers — or just George, I can’t remember — gave him, or lent him, some. And I had some from you and Daddy, so I put in that. And so we go and it’s crazy expensive but we have this really awesome time. Beach, beautiful water, always sunny. Always sunny. Beautiful people. And this is years ago and we’re kind of still just dating even though it’s serious and everything, but he’s trying to impress me and get me to officially fall in love with him — I think the whole trip was his idea to get me to decide that I really loved him — and anyways, we’re having this great time and of course Johnny’s meeting everybody and we’re always with these other couples, smoking Bob Marley all the time because there’s a lot of grass down there if you get to know the guys from the beach.
“But there’s also these two guys from Britain at the resort too, and the sight of them is just driving Johnny crazy. One of them is maybe twenty-two and seems like a kid, and the other one is, I don’t know, maybe sixty. And they both have their hair dyed identically blond. So you can imagine what they looked like. But — and this is hilarious — at the end of the first day, and believe me you noticed them right away, they were very loud and overdone and especially the young one had a shrill voice and actually ran everywhere, but Johnny somehow didn’t get it right away that they were gay, I think maybe he thought they were just really excited to be on vacation, so after dinner we were all just sitting around and Johnny suddenly asked everybody if ‘the English man and his son’ weren’t completely bugging the shit out of them. Like they were doing to him. The English man and his son. And people just spit up! Were they laughing! I was killing myself! Because, especially him, not to get that. And then he got it, and it was so obvious, but somehow he missed it at first and me and the other couples just pissed ourselves thinking about Johnny watching that little English boy spread lotion on his father’s back . . .”
Honey stops, gathers a breath. You look at her mom. She seems thoroughly enchanted with the story so far. Honey looks at you. You look away again, fish around the table for another smoke. You know you’ve heard this story before but don’t really remember where it goes. Johnny ends up a hero or something. You study her mom again. To you, so far, this is not the kind of story your average daughter tells your average mother, and it’s certainly not the kind of story a mother would enjoy hearing. Is it? Can anybody be this encouraging?
“So now these two poor gay guys are really making Johnny mental for the next few days. Just the sight of them. Oh, you had to see it when the young one would come over at the pool bar and sort of worm his way onto the older man’s lap. Johnny would get completely bug-eyed. And they were always talking too loud with all the old ladies they’d become so friendly with, and they had big flowery towels that they tucked into themselves at the waist, like skirts, and a bright yellow air mattress shaped like a phone that they carried everywhere. Johnny couldn’t help himself. He was always trying to look at them and not look at them at the same time. I actually felt sorry for him, he looked so miserable. I said to him once, ‘They’re ruining your stupid trip.’ And then he starting getting kind of mean whenever they were around and really just giving them awful, awful looks. And saying a few things. And so they started getting uncomfortable too, because until then they were having just the most wonderful time.
“Then we end up one night at a reggae place, Johnny and me and a few other couples plus some Bajan guys. And the two English guys are there too. And I don’t remember but Johnny’s being pretty shitty to them, when he’s not out back smoking up all the time, and then eventually I wanted to leave because it’s very late but he didn’t want to, and so somehow, even though I shouldn’t, me and this other girl end up in a cab — you go everywhere there by cab — and Johnny and her boyfriend will come later. And like I said, I don’t want to take a cab back to the hotel with just this girl and this big black taxi driver that I don’t know, but Johnny lets me go, I guess. Though to be honest, I don’t even know if he saw me when I left. I was kind of mad. So finally we leave and then doesn’t the taxi driver stop halfway to the hotel to let his friend in and then we all end up going a different way, of course, not straight to the hotel but through this fish market instead, where there are these restaurant shacks and music and tables where you can buy things. But everything’s closed up because it’s so late and there’s just lonely music playing from one speaker on a pole and then they stop the car there and they want us to get out and dance with them and there’s almost nobody else around. Especially no other girls.”
“Oh my,” says Mrs. Zamner. But calmly.
“And the other girl and I start to freak out. We’re trying to be calm and be cool and not be scared but that hasn’t worked at all and so now we’re going to scream if they don’t start the car back up. Which they finally do, but then there’s always a delay and a reason why we can’t leave right away and they try to get us to smoke with them, which we don’t, and the other girl — Meredith — screams a few times, she’s starting to really lose it. But it’s amazing how nobody responds. Nobody! And then that’s not even true because these other guys come over, and these other guys are even worse news than the cab driver and his stupid idiot friend who started everything. These new guys are scary and mean. We’re starting to look at the first two assholes to protect us, that’s how scary these new guys are.”
And again you look at Mrs. Zamner, who is still smiling and sipping her wine and following the story with perfect aplomb. Maybe she’s heard the story before. Maybe Honey doesn’t remember she’s already told dear old mom the bit about how the black guys almost gang-raped her all night at the fish market. There’s only two things that smell like fish. But you would think that, even so, every time you heard this story about your daughter you’d get a little more rattled than this fifty-year-old woman with the nerves of an assassin seems to be getting. What is it about Europe?
“And then what?” Mrs. Zamner asks sweetly.
“They killed you?” you venture.
Honey doesn’t even glance over your way. “Meanwhile, the two gay men have left the club not much after us and they’ve taken a taxi back to the resort and the older one somehow thinks to ask around and check if we’ve returned, and we haven’t, and he waits a few more minutes and asks around some more and somehow — I swear I don’t know how — figures out that something’s wrong, and they take a taxi back to the club and find Johnny. And Johnny actually smartens up and grabs this local guy, Carson, who’s a pretty heavy guy and who was getting all the dope for everyone, and somehow Carson — I don’t know how, again — figures out where to look and so he and Johnny and the two English ones get back in with the cabbie and the five of them go speeding through the town and out to the fish market where we are!”
Heidi Zamner’s eyes widen a millimetre.
“And the cab has very bad brakes and actually slams into the pole with the speaker when it tries to stop in the parking lot. But we’re not far from there and we hear this, and the music stops when the speaker gets smashed and so then you hear nothing except this guy Carson who’s holding a handgun in the air and running towards us and then Johnny who overtakes him and comes roaring up and plows into the two guys we were with first. And he starts smacking the cab driver in the head and then kicking the guy’s friend in the ass over and over and over — which I did too, a few times — and the other meaner guys have all taken off by now, and Carson puts me and the girl and finally Johnny into the cab they came in, and gets himself and the English guys into the other cab, and we peel out of the fish market and back to the hotel a million miles an hour in a car which, I’m thinking the whole way, basically has no brakes.”
The waitress brings the salmon and your big salad.
There’s a silence while everyone fingers their cutlery and tinkers with their food. Heidi Zamner contemplates her daughter’s harrowing tale, hears in it the potential treachery of youth. But also the mercy of fate. She looks into her daughter’s eyes, deeper than you or Johnny or anyone else on God’s earth could ever do, to see the daughter who has spoken, safe now, retelling the episode with a tiny laugh from the safety of a stylish wrought iron chair on the sun-splashed terrace of a restaurant many years later.
Honey’s thinly disguised pleasure at being able to shock her mother, the quick licks at her lips betraying her childish pride, is evident. And to her — you’re watching now as she hacks a manly swatch of salmon for herself and drowns it in a pool of computer-beige sauce circa 1996 — it’s really just a story, the subject was gay people and so this was her story with two gay guys right smack in the middle of it. And the main point for her, the fun part, was how Johnny more or less had to eat shit the whole rest of the trip. The way he had to tiptoe around the English guys after that.
But to you the story has a different meaning. To you it’s different.
It’s simpler. It’s precise.
It’s Honey remembering the time that she did, in fact, fall in love with the boy Johnny Karakis.
It’s that moment.
The stupid salad is good. You dig into the heaping bowl with a sudden appetite. Honey tears another strip off her fish, plunges it into the sauce. Mrs. Zamner dips delicately into her brown rice, raises her fork to her mouth.
You remember Johnny recounting his version of this same incident to you back then. He talked about how sick it made him feel to make nice with these two malakas poustis. But he had to. And that he found the older guy, the guy who saved Honey, to be an all right guy in the end. But not the boy toy, Conrad. And he also found them, despite their girlish shrieks and hands forever in the air, to be just another sad couple from England, no happier or more fulfilled or gayer than anyone else.
Mrs. Zamner glances over at her daughter then over at you. Gathering the two of you in. Together. She won’t even ask. She’s too polite. Too positive. She scoops up another tiny mound of rice.
Honey’s mother knows, you think to yourself.
You watch the ugly man in the background. If he was interested before, he no longer is. His paper is folded up and he looks to catch the eye of the waitress, seeking the bill. You look around, spot her standing over by the windows. Watching you, actually. You wonder vaguely if she recognizes you from the Liz Hunter thing. She shrugs herself away from the wall, makes her way through the tables over to him.